It is Lucy Easthope’s job to imagine the worst. Her 2022 book When the Dust Settles recounted lessons learned from more than two decades working in emergency planning and disaster management: plane crashes, terrorist attacks, natural disasters, fires – and, of course, a global pandemic. “We are all disaster survivors now,” she wrote at the end of the book. When I interviewed her for the New Statesman in 2023, she warned that people were still “in denial” about how much living through Covid affected us all.
Denial is a key theme of her new radio series, At Your Own Peril, broadcast daily on Radio 4. It’s a history of risk: what it is, how humans calculate and respond to it, and what we can do to manage it in the face of existential threats such as climate change, nuclear war and the rise of artificial intelligence.
The subject matter might sound depressing, even narrated in Easthope’s gentle Liverpudlian cadences. At one point she reflects on a civil servant interrupting a briefing on mitigating disaster risks in early 2001: “Let’s have no more planning,” he pleaded, “for planes crashing into buildings.” This isn’t the only time Easthope feels she’s been “condemned to the role of Cassandra” in her career, accused of overreacting by drawing attention to hazards policymakers would rather not think about (the Grenfell Tower tragedy also springs to mind). She counters the bleakness with fascinating forays into other intellectual realms. The classicist Mary Beard pops up to talk about Roman gambling games; the statistician David Spiegelhalter explains Pascal’s wager and the development of probability theory; and the champion forecaster Nate Silver shares his insights on predicting elections.
We learn why humans irrationally feel safer driving than flying, why extreme sports scare us less than nuclear power, and how risk perception can be politicised. If you’ve ever wondered why climate change or vaccines have become fronts in the culture war, listen in. Yes, this series will terrify you. But isn’t it better to understand what we’re facing?
At Your Own Peril
BBC Sounds
[See also: The Tories’ Brexit tailspin]
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This article appears in the 05 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The New Gods of AI